Reconfiguring families in contemporary Vietnam

Reconfiguring Families in Contemporary Vietnam chronicles and analyzes the most significant change for families in Vietnam's recent past – the transition to a market economy, referred to as Doi Moi in Vietnamese and generally translated as the "renovation". Two decades have passed since the wide-ranging institutional transformations that took place reconfigured the ways families produce and reproduce. The downsizing of the socialist welfare system and the return of the household as the unit of production and consumption redefined the boundaries between the public and private.

This volume is the first to offer a multidisciplinary perspective that sets its gaze exclusively on processes at work in the everyday lives of families, and on the implications for gender and intergenerational relations. By focusing on families, this book shifts the spotlight from macro transformations of the renovation era, orchestrated by those in power, to micro-level transformations, experienced daily in households between husbands and wives, parents and children, grandparents and other family members.

About the author (2009)

Magali Barbieri is a researcher for the Institut National d'Études Démographiques in Paris, and is the head of its Population and Development Division. Danièle Bélanger is the Canada Research Chair in Population, Gender and Development, and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Ontario.